In another era, Tom and Yvette Weatherly might never have known each other. They grew up in opposite worlds in Atlanta, his white and affluent, hers black and working-class. But as the children of integration, they met when she was bused to his virtually all-white high school and sat behind him in English class. They helped each other with class work and goaded each other to raise their hands.

Eight years ago they were married. They have survived their families' shock and disapproval and the stares and unwelcome comments of strangers. They know not to stop in small towns or rural areas when they travel.

They are part of a small but rapidly growing corps of interracial couples who, wittingly or not, have put themselves on the front lines of American race relations, staring into the face of age-old stereotypes and painfully aware that their public embraces can unsettle all but the most tolerant Americans.

The number of black-white marriages has more than tripled since 1970, according to the Census Bureau. And while interracial marriage is far more common between whites and members of other minorities, no pairing hits as raw a nerve as unions between blacks and whites. "We are a segregationist's worst nightmare," said Weatherly, a 30-year-old systems analyst. "But to other people, we're the perfect example."

As the nation confronts persistent racial bigotry, fanned by a stagnant economy and politicians like David Duke, these couples are quietly trying to bridge two increasingly alienated worlds.

Many manage a veneer of civility with once hostile in-laws. Others find acceptance from more tolerant families, particularly with the arrival of the firstborn.

But a few have not even told their parents that they are married and have children. Some say that even after decades of marriage, they are made to feel as if their relationships are illicit or unseemly. Many suffer indignities like being spat upon or refused services. And most say they want the one thing society seems not quite ready to give them: acceptance as ordinary couples.

"It has not passed the 'no blink' test," said Dr. Tom W. Smith, a researcher on social issues at the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago. "It's clear that the majority of whites are not prepared to accept this as just another couple. The minimum you get is a look and a stare."

According to the General Social Survey, an annual polling of 1,500 American adults of all races directed by Smith, a significant proportion of whites -- 1 in 5 -- still believe interracial marriage should be illegal, as against 2 in 5 whites asked the question in 1972. "They feel so strongly about it that they don't even want to leave it up to the individual," said Smith, who has conducted the survey for 19 years.

Further, 66 percent of whites said they would oppose a close relative's marrying a black person. Only 4 percent said they would favor it; the remainder said race was not a factor one way or the other. (The margin of sampling error in the poll was plus or minus three and a half to four percentage points, and six to seven percentage points for blacks.)

No other ethnic or racial group engenders as intense a response from whites. About 45 percent of whites said they would oppose a close relative's marriage to an Asian or Hispanic person and 15 percent said they would oppose a marriage between a close relative and a Jew, according to the survey.

Blacks, on the other hand, exhibited indifference to intermarriage, with nearly two-thirds saying they would neither favor nor oppose a relative's marrying someone from another race.

To be sure, some white opposition has melted. The beaming faces of interracial couples appear with little protest on the wedding pages of Southern newspapers like The Augusta Chronicle in Georgia, a state where such unions were illegal until the 1970's. Television shows like "The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd" and movies like "Jungle Fever" have brought interracial relationships to living rooms and theaters across the country, usually in a more realistic fashion than in the 1967 film "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?"

And in the contentious confirmation hearings of Clarence Thomas to be Supreme Court Justice, his marriage to Virginia Lamp, a white woman from Nebraska, drew little comment. The two were seen every morning of the hearings holding hands and giving each other good-luck kisses on national television.

But these new signs of openness do not necessarily translate into approval for most of these couples.

Teresa Johnson, a white social worker, has been married to Ralph Johnson, a black actor, for 17 years. They have two teen-age children and a house in the Hyde Park section of Chicago. Her relatives are miles away in Cleveland, and all but the very closest of them know her by her maiden name; they think she is single and childless.

To protect this secret, she has not been to a family wedding or funeral since she married, for fear that the topic might come up. For years, only her parents knew. But they were horrified at the news and dared not let it slip. She didn't even bother to tell them she was pregnant the last time.

"They were so upset about the first one," said Mrs. Johnson, 40, "because that meant I wasn't turning back."

For years her parents would not let her children enter their house, preferring instead to meet them at the airport or at a pizza parlor in some other neighborhood. Now her parents let the children visit -- but only at night so the neighbors won't see.

"To this day" said Johnson, "I can't go to their house because of the neighbors."

Mrs. Johnson said she felt caught in a cruel paradox because people cannot get beyond the color of her husband's skin. "Here we are, a typical middle-class family," she said. "Ralph's a Little League coach. He's on the local school council. I have cousins who have kids out the wedlock, who are juvenile delinquents and in the Hell's Angels. But I'm the one on the outs. If my husband was white and beat me, that would be OK."

Marriages between blacks and whites make up a tiny fraction of all married couples in the country -- about 4 of every 1,000. But the numbers are rising, as well as the ratio, which was 1.5 out of 1,000 in 1970. There were 65,000 black-white marriages in 1970 and 211,000 in 1990, according to Census figures. While these figures are not broken down by state or region, researchers say such marriages are more common on the East and West Coasts than elsewhere, and far more common in cities than in suburbs or rural areas.

The rise in intermarriage and whites' almost primal feelings against it are an important measure of the threshold for integration, social scientists say.

"Intermarriage is like the tip of the iceberg," said Dr. Richard D. Alba, chairman of the sociology department at the State University of New York at Albany, who is a specialist in ethnic intermarriage and race relations. "It is the visible expression of a host of attitudes and informal contacts that are otherwise hard to measure. Whites have difficulty accepting blacks as neighbors and co-workers, and all the more as members of the family."

Still, things are far different from in 1958, when Richard Loving and Mildred Jeter were married in Washington and promptly arrested back home in Virginia. The groom, who was white, and the bride, who was black, were accused of violating the state's anti-miscegenation law, a felony, and faced up to five years in prison. In exchange for a suspended sentence, they were forbidden to set foot in Virginia for 25 years.

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